A copyright is form of intellectual property protection that covers published and unpublished creative works, whatever the form of expression, provided such works are fixed in a tangible form. In general, copyright laws grant the owner of the copyright the exclusive right to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute, perform, and display the work publicly. Accordingly, a party or person seeking to use a copyrighted work typically needs to obtain a license from the copyright owner to use the copyrighted work.
Obtaining the appropriate licenses is made more complicated by the fact that different parties may own or have exclusive control over a different portion of the full bundle of rights for a copyrighted work. For example, one party may own or have the exclusive right to make one type of derivative work from the copyrighted work, and another party may own or have the exclusive right to make another type of derivative work. A third party may own or have the exclusive right to display the copyrighted work, and yet another party may own or have the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the copyrighted work. Also, the rights may also be divided up by region. That is, one party may own or have the exclusive right to display the work in one geographic region and another party may own or have the exclusive right to display the work in another geographic region.
A party seeking to use a copyrighted work for some purpose, such as an advertising campaign, a movie, or a television show, for example, may therefore need to obtain a number of different licenses from potentially a number of different parties. For example, if a movie house wants to use a copyrighted song in a movie distributed worldwide, it may need to obtain the right to play the song in each of the relevant geographic regions. It will also need the right to distribute the song to each of the theatres where the movie is to be played. If the movie house intends to sell CDs with the soundtrack of the movie and DVDs of the movie, it may also need licenses for these uses as well. The movie house may have to obtain such licenses for each copyrighted song in the movie. Also, it may need additional licenses as new ways of reproducing and distributing digital manifestations of the copyrighted work become available, such as web downloads and cable-based video-on-demand systems. Current processes for obtaining such licenses are time consuming, cumbersome, and expensive. Ways to streamline and shorten the process are needed.
Another complicating factor is that the advent of digital media and high-speed computer networks has made the copying of digital copyrighted works much easier. The fact that copying is easier, however, does not obviate the need to obtain appropriate licenses. Nevertheless, a current and escalating problem in today's society is that many Internet users post copyrighted works (e.g., videos or music tracks) on the Internet for downloading by others without the appropriate licenses. Ways for simplifying the process of obtaining the appropriate licenses are therefore needed.